Agatha Webb by Anna Katharine Green Read Free Book Online Page B

to meet her just as if she knew what
Sairey was going to say before ever a word left her lips. 'My
baby!' (I can hear her yet.) 'Something is the matter with the
baby!' And though Sairey made haste to tell her that he was only
ailing and not at all ill, she turned upon Philemon with a look
none of us ever quite understood; he changed so completely under
it, just as she had under Sairey's; and to neither did the old
happiness ever return, for the child died within a week, and when
the next came it died also, and the next, till six small innocents
lay buried in yonder old graveyard."
    "I know; and sad enough it was too, especially as she and Philemon
were both fond of children. Well, well, the ways of Providence are
past rinding out! And now she is gone and Philemon—"
    "Ah, he'll follow her soon; he can't live without Agatha."
    Nearer home, the old sexton was chattering about the six
gravestones raised in Portchester churchyard to these six dead
infants. He had been sent there to choose a spot in which to lay
the mother, and was full of the shock it gave him to see that line
of little stones, telling of a past with which the good people of
Sutherlandtown found it hard to associate Philemon and Agatha
Webb.
    "I'm a digger of graves," he mused, half to himself and half to
his old wife watching him from the other side of the hearthstone.
"I spend a good quarter of my time in the churchyard; but when I
saw those six little mounds, and read the inscriptions over them,
I couldn't help feeling queer. Think of this! On the first tiny
headstone I read these words:"
    STEPHEN,
    Son of Philemon and Agatha Webb,
    Died, Aged Six Weeks.
    God be merciful to me a sinner!
    "Now what does that mean? Did you ever hear anyone say?"
    "No," was his old wife's answer. "Perhaps she was one of those
Calvinist folks who believe babies go to hell if they are not
baptised."
    "But her children were all baptised. I've been told so; some of
them before she was well out of her bed. 'God be merciful to me a
sinner!' And the chick not six weeks old! Something queer about
that, dame, if it did happen more than thirty years ago."
    "What did you see over the grave of the child who was killed in
her arms by lightning?"
    "This:
    "'And he was not, for God took him.'"
    Farmer Waite had but one word to say:
    "She came to me when my Sissy had the smallpox; the only person in
town who would enter my doors. More than that; when Sissy was up
and I went to pay the doctor's bill I found it had been settled. I
did not know then who had enough money and compassion to do this
for me; now I do."
    Many an act of kindness which had been secretly performed in that
town during the last twenty years came to light on that day, the
most notable of which was the sending of a certain young lad to
school and his subsequent education as a minister.
    But other memories of a sweeter and more secret nature still came
up likewise, among them the following:
    A young girl, who was of a very timid but deeply sensitive nature,
had been urged into an engagement with a man she did not like.
Though the conflict this occasioned her and the misery which
accompanied it were apparent to everybody, nobody stirred in her
behalf but Agatha. She went to see her, and, though it was within
a fortnight of the wedding, she did not hesitate to advise the
girl to give him up, and when the poor child said she lacked the
courage, Agatha herself went to the man and urged him into a
display of generosity which saved the poor, timid thing from a
life of misery. They say this was no easy task for Agatha, and
that the man was sullen for a year. But the girl's gratitude was
boundless.
    Of her daring, which was always on the side of right and justice,
the stories were numerous; so were the accounts, mostly among the
women, of her rare tenderness and sympathy for the weak and the
erring. Never was a man talked to as she talked to Jake Cobleigh
the evening after he struck his mother, and if she had been in
town on the day